While Boris Johnson has busied himself rearranging the deckchairs, the 'drip,drip' of allegations of misdeeds has continued. The clearly coordinated assault on Johnson's character, equally clearly with the egregious Dominic Cummings hand on the tiller, has produced claims and pictures of the Prime Minister supposedly breaking all sorts of rules during the national lockdowns related to the late unlamented COVID epidemic; rather shockingly, much of the media has ignored it's own responsibility to be truthful and has painted every tasty morsel in the worst possible light, effectively prejudging the outcome of a police investigation which, itself, is an enormous over-reaction.
One of the worst examples of this emerged yesterday when it was reported that Johnson had been pictured surrounded by bottles of fizz and people adorned with tinsel. The photograph in question actually appears to show the Prime Minister standing at some distance from either people or fizz, which raises serious questions about the reliability of press reports and the media in general. How many of the other multitude of allegations, made by a coterie of anti-Boris zealots, have been similarly hyped up and misreported ?
Boris Johnson may well have broken rules, but he didn't murder anyone, nor did he actually injure anyone in any way. In fact he stands accused of what are little more than social contraventions, albeit that some of these had been enshrined in law due to the panic over COVID. However, the current obsession with pursuing 'crimes' which are no more than causing offence has led to Johnson's misdeeds being accorded a far higher level of scrutiny and far greater approbation than they deserve.
It does appear that Johnson has, at least, been unwise at times and may well have infringed some of his own COVID rules; he may even have tried to cover up his indiscretions, though whether such behaviour is worthy of the character assassination currently being practised is debatable. Many previous Prime Ministers had their shortcomings too, though they were lucky that the internet, social media, instant photography and the paparazzi either didn't exist in their time or were less active.
It really is time to move on from what has now become a rather boring story. Cummings may be a very clever schemer but the continued drip of allegations, while it still attracts the attention of the media and Westminster Bubble in particular, for most of the population I suspect the story has now run its course. We have other things to worry about, such as potential war in Ukraine, dealing with the aftermath of Brexit, rising inflation, sky-high energy prices and issues of energy supply, a 'Green' agenda no one voted for, uncontrolled illegal immigration, illiterate children, drug gangs controlling multitudes of children, street violence, increasing restrictions on freedom of speech, police vigorously pursuing 'non-crime hate incidents' in preference to real crimes, and so much more.
Do I care about the honesty and integrity of our political leaders ? Of course I do, but today's mob are almost certainly no different to those of the past and the attention on the minutiae of their behaviour is hugely excessive. We all know that Tony Blair lied about Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction', John Major had an affair with Edwina Currie while both were MPs and Major was a government Whip, Ted Heath misled the nation about the EEC, Harold Wilson had friends who were later implicated in cases of fraud and corruption and, of course, to go back to an earlier generation, William Gladstone was well known to have an interest in 'fallen women'. All of these, and others, were far from perfect.
Today, there are far more important things to focus on than whether or not Boris Johnson failed to maintain a 2-metre distance between himself and others in his offices, or whether he partook of a glass of bubbly at a colleague's leaving do.
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